Explore what's next by hearing from industry pioneers

Red Hat® Summit 2024 represents an opportunity to share experiences and impact as we plot the future of open technology.

Keynote & demo speakers

Discover new perspectives on the current and future technology landscape with insights from open source leaders.

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Matt Hicks

President and CEO, Red Hat

Matt Hicks was named President and Chief Executive Officer of Red Hat in July 2022. In his previous role, he was Executive Vice President of Products and Technologies where he was responsible for all product engineering, including products such as Red Hat OpenShift®, Red Hat Enterprise Linux®, the JBoss® middleware portfolio, OpenStack® and Ansible®.

He has been with Red Hat for 16 years, watching it grow from a single-product company to the multi-billion-dollar enterprise it is today. He was also one of the founding members of the OpenShift team and has been at the forefront of cloud computing ever since.

With more than 25 years of Linux experience and a background in computer engineering, Hicks has always had a passion for combining infrastructure and application technologies. His engineering background includes several years at IBM, as well as startup experience, where he served in various roles spanning engineering, IT, and consulting. This breadth of experience has allowed Hicks to use technology to solve customer and business problems across all areas of IT. With technology innovation converging on open source, Linux, and containers, his experience has placed him at the center of what he believes to be the most exciting time in industry history.

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Chris Wright

Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President, Global Engineering, Red Hat

Chris Wright is Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President of Global Engineering at Red Hat. He leads a team that guides Red Hat’s technology vision, co-creates technologies, and collaboratively implements change to ensure the success of Red Hat’s ecosystem of associates, customers, communities, and partners.

Wright’s organization includes: Office of the CTO, Ecosystem Engineering, Product Security, Global Engineering Associate Experience, Product Engineering, Experience Engineering, and CTO Customer-Led Open Innovation.

During his 25+ years as a software engineer, Wright has worked in the telecommunications industry and beyond on high-availability and distributed systems. He also has experience in the Linux industry on security, virtualization, and networking. Wright has been a Linux developer for more than 15 years, with most of this time spent working deep in the Linux kernel. He is passionate about open source software serving as the foundation for next-generation IT systems.

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Stefanie Chiras

Senior Vice President, Partner Ecosystem Success, Red Hat

Stefanie Chiras is Senior Vice President of Partner Ecosystem Success at Red Hat. She leads Red Hat’s global partner ecosystem engagement to foster relevance for our customers and growth for our partners.

She focuses on setting the global partner strategy and establishing clear paths for partner success across the entire ecosystem. Chiras plays a critical role in articulating the value of Red Hat’s product portfolio and defining the strategy for partnering with Red Hat for customer success.

Chiras has held several senior product leadership positions at Red Hat, most recently as Senior Vice President of the Platforms Business Group, where she was responsible for defining, building, and executing the company’s cross-platform strategy and the products that support it.

Prior to that, Chiras was Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux organization at Red Hat, where she was responsible for the entire product line.

Before Red Hat, Chiras served as Vice President of Offering Management at IBM Cognitive Systems. As part of the Cognitive Systems brand team, she led worldwide business for the systems and system software portfolios, AIX, IBM i, Linux, and the cloud stack. She also led the portfolio’s transformation to support enterprise workloads and artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning.

Chiras has extensive experience in both business and technology. Her technical roles range from silicon technology to system architecture, as well as both IBM Power Systems and IBMz processor design. She also has served as a member of IBM’s Research Division and IBM Systems and Technology Group.

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Ashesh Badani

Senior Vice President and Chief Product Officer, Red Hat

Ashesh Badani is the Senior Vice President and Chief Product Officer at Red Hat. In this role, he is responsible for the company’s overall product portfolio and business unit groups, including product strategy, business planning, product management, marketing, and operations across on-premise, public cloud, and edge.

His product responsibilities include Red Hat Enterprise Linux®, Red Hat OpenShift®, Red Hat Ansible Automation®, developer tools, and middleware, as well as emerging cloud services and experiences.

Previously, Badani was Senior Vice President of Cloud Platforms, where he helped solidify the company as a hybrid cloud and enterprise Kubernetes leader. Under his leadership, Red Hat has also expanded OpenShift® from an award-winning Platform-as-a-Service solution to the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform, with 1,000+ customers spanning all regions and industries. Badani started at Red Hat overseeing product line management and marketing for the Red Hat JBoss® Enterprise Application Platform middleware portfolio.

Badani has played a significant role around strategy, analysis, and integration for key Red Hat acquisitions—including StackRox in 2021, CoreOS in 2018, and FuseSource in 2012—to bolster the company’s integration portfolio.

Prior to joining Red Hat, Badani served as Director of Product Management and Product Marketing of Integration and Application Platform Products at Sun Microsystems. He has more than 20 years of experience in the technology and finance industries at both established and emerging companies.

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Leigh Day

Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer

Leigh Day is Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at Red Hat. Throughout her more than 20 years at Red Hat, she has held a variety of positions. Her earliest role was creating an online advertising revenue stream to help supplement business for Red Hat® Linux® (Red Hat’s original boxed product).

She advanced into product management and product marketing for Red Hat Linux and then moved into a pivotal leadership role—building an in-house Marketing Communications and Brand function responsible for simplifying, unifying and amplifying Red Hat’s unique messaging-voice to deliver noteworthy experiences for Red Hat customers and partners.

Day started at Red Hat in 1999 as employee number 139, collaborating to make Red Hat a world-class software company built around open source technology. She was an integral part of the Marketing team that launched Red Hat into "the enterprise" with Red Hat Enterprise Linux in 2001, and has led the team responsible for Red Hat’s annual user conference, Red Hat Summit, since its inception in 2005. This gathering of Red Hat customers, partners, developers, and associates has become the industry's premier open source technology conference. Under Day’s leadership, Red Hat has launched many successful marketing programs like Command Line Heroes, redhat.com, Open Source Stories, Co.Lab, and more. Day also led the Marketing team for more than 20 acquisitions at Red Hat, helping to expand awareness of our portfolio as it grew and evolved.

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Craig Mitchell

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Manager

Craig Mitchell is the Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Manager at Navy Federal Credit Union, where his current leadership role reflects his aptitude for leveraging technology to streamline processes, ensuring system reliability and optimal performance.

Today, as an SRE Manager, Craig marries his varied experiences to offer a unique perspective, always striving to bridge the gap between technology and its real-world applications. As a champion of progress and efficiency, he remains committed to ushering in a future where automation serves as the backbone of seamless operations.

Craig is a 16-year veteran of the British Army and a chartered management accountant.

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Baljinder Kang

Enterprise Engineering, Director

Baljinder Kang is the Head of Platform Engineering at NatWest Group, transforming the bank's approach to engineering. He has successfully introduced new development approaches, new tooling, and new applications to the bank.

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Dr. Ellen Grant

Director, Fetal Neonatal Neuroimaging and Developmental Science Center at Harvard University

Dr. Ellen Grant is the Käthe Beutler, MD Harvard Professor of Pediatrics and Professor of Radiology, Harvard Medical School. She is a neuroradiologist and directs research for the Maternal Fetal Care Center, Faculty Affairs for Radiology and is the Founding Director of the Developmental Science Center (DSC), Boston Children’s Hospital. The DSC focuses on technology development and has more than 70 members with 17 faculty and 7 postdoctoral students.

In the past decade, her center has raised $80M to support their research. Dr. Grant is a Fellow of the American College of Radiology and Senior Fellow of the International Society of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM). She received the Outstanding Contributions in Research Award from the American Society of Neuroradiology in 2021 and the Gold Medal Award from the American Society of Pediatric Neuroradiology in 2022. She has published over 300 articles and is currently principal investigator (PI) on 8 major National Institutes of Health (NIH) awards.

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Chris Morgan

Vice President, Technical Marketing and Partner Products, Hybrid Platforms

Chris Morgan is the Senior Director of Customer and Field Engagement for Red Hat hybrid platforms, which includes Red Hat OpenShiftⓇ, Red Hat OpenStackⓇ Platform, managed services, and Red Hat Virtualization.

He has almost 30 years of experience in various areas of cloud and application technologies, with the last 15 years of that experience with Red Hat as an original member of the OpenShift team. Prior to Red Hat, Chris spent a large portion of his early career at IBM, where he worked on cross-brand initiatives to bring the various IBM software products together as cohesive solutions. His experience has spanned many roles allowing him to research and work on ideas and solutions to address next-generation markets.

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Kaete Piccirilli

Director, Product Marketing, Ansible Automation

Kaete Piccirilli is Director of Product Marketing for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. Her passion for bringing together people and technology comes to life as she helps customers discover how automation can help them achieve their business priorities.

Kaete has more than 10 years of software industry experience in product marketing roles, and has led marketing for Ansible since joining Red Hat in 2016. Prior to joining the tech industry in 2013, Kaete led project and account management teams for nearly a decade.

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Andrew Sullivan

Senior Manager, Technical Marketing

Andrew is Senior Manager for hybrid platform solutions patterns at Red Hat. He focuses on Red Hat OpenShift, virtualization, and modernizing application development and infrastructure management for today’s applications. Andrew has worked in the IT industry for more than 20 years and has a rich history of database development, infrastructure architecture, and containers.

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Maria Bracho

Chief Technology Officer, LATAM

María Bracho serves as the Chief Technology Officer for Red Hat in Latin America, where she is responsible for growing high-impact partnerships with key strategic customers and ultimately helping shape the company’s technological vision and strategy.

In this role, she delivers innovative solutions for leading companies across multiple industries. She's a trusted partner who engages technical and business officers to define needs and align technology initiatives with broader organizational goals. Through her participation at industry events, she shares the Red Hat portfolio and engages with worldwide audiences.

Before joining Red Hat, she was a Product Manager at Dell and Tata Communications.

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Sherard Griffin

Senior Director of Engineering, OpenShift AI

Sherard Griffin has been at Red Hat since 2017 and currently the Senior Director of Engineering for OpenShift AI. His responsibilities include the development of Red Hat OpenShift AI, a new managed service and self-managed product for data scientists and application developers to develop applications infused with AI.

Sherard has spent his time at Red Hat advocating how customers can democratize access to scalable hybrid cloud AI technologies and platforms within their organizations. He is also responsible for Open Data Hub, a community-driven open source AI platform on OpenShift. Additionally, he works with hardware and software partners to build out an ecosystem of AI technologies optimized to run on OpenShift.

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Dr. Rudolph Pienaar

Staff Scientist, Boston Children’s Hospital

Dr. Pienaar's passion about software transforming medicine inspired him to create and architect the ChRIS (ChRIS Research Integration System) platform at Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH). His academic background is electrical/electronic/biomedical engineering, with focus on software and systems in scientific computing and machine learning.

At BCH, he is a member of the Faculty Research Council, and consults on strategy with the Innovation Digital Health Accelerator. He is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), as well as the Organization for Human Brain Mapping (OHBM) and has been invited lead editor on special editions of computing in medicine. He mentors graduate level computer science courses on advanced cloud computing at Boston University and Northeastern University. He has been funded by various National Institute of Health projects and also several corporate-sponsored research efforts, as well as BCH Foundational Radiology and Technology Innovation Development awards.

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Nicole Ganung

Senior Software Engineer

Nicole Ganung, Senior Software Engineer at Southwest Airlines, specializes in network automation solutions. Leading the development of innovative in-house software, Nicole and her team have enhanced troubleshooting, development, and deployment processes within network infrastructure.

She was the driving force behind initiating and building a custom application that serves as a comprehensive hub for network automation, complete with self-service diagnostic tools and automations available at a single click. This work has significantly reduced network downtime and streamlined operations across various departments.

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Sathish Balakrishnan

Senior Software Engineer

Sathish Balakrishnan is Vice President and General Manager of Ansible Business Unit at Red Hat. He is responsible for the Automation business. Prior to this, he has led other businesses at Red Hat including Hybrid Cloud Experience & Developer Tools, Cloud Services and has been with Red Hat since 2013. Prior to joining Red Hat, Sathish worked with Bay Area startups as well as management consulting firms.

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Mat Jovanovic

Corporate Cloud Strategy Director

Mat Jovanovic, Corporate Cloud Strategy Director at MAPFRE, is a cloud strategist with 15 years of experience solving business problems with technology. Mat is in charge of global cloud and automation strategy at MAPFRE.

Mat advocates serverless and other cloud-native architectures for modern applications and site-reliability engineering (SRE) and platform engineering as go-to automation and DevOps strategies.

Relevant certifications and awards include:

• Top 10 Cloud Strategy Leaders in Europe in 2023, by CIOreview.

• AWS Certified Professional Solutions Architect and Certified DevOps Professional.

• Azure Certified Cloud Architect Expert.ilk

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Máirín Duffy

Senior Principal UX Engineer

Máirín Duffy is a Senior Principal UX Engineer at Red Hat. A recipient of the O’Reilly Open Source Award, Máirín has 2 decades of expertise in user experience and design working in upstream free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) communities. Her portfolio includes a wide range of designs for FLOSS, from systems management tools to desktop infrastructure and applications, and from Podman Desktop to the cloud-based medical image processing project, ChRIS.

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Dafne Mendoza

Principal Product Manager, Ansible

Dafné Mendoza is a Principal Product Manager for Network Automation for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. For the previous 2 years, Dafné was Principal Technical Marketing Manager for Edge and Network Automation at Red Hat.

Prior to Red Hat, Dafné worked at Cisco Systems, helping service provider, government, and financial customers across the U.S., Canada, and Latin America design, implement, and adopt automation, orchestration, and network management solutions. She has more than 14 years of experience in the IT industry, with specializations in Cisco DevNet, IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL), Scrum, consulting, networking, and automation.

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Carlos Tapia

Senior Software Engineer

Carlos Tapia is a Senior Software Engineer at Southwest Airlines, leading the development of network automation to manage and configure the airline's network infrastructure. In his role, Carlos focuses on the design, development, testing, and implementation of network automation using Python, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, and Itential.

He works with his team to provide Southwest’s network engineers and customers the automation they need to achieve their goals. Carlos also shares tips and ideas on network automation on his blog The Network Automator.

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Mike Ferris

Senior Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer

Michael Ferris is Senior Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer at Red Hat. In this role, he is focused on building the company’s global business strategy across all offerings and services, mergers and acquisitions, and market-making partnerships.

Throughout his 20+ years at Red Hat, Ferris has focused on the value of the company’s business model. He served as the first product manager for Red Hat® Enterprise Linux®, and he later led the evolution of Red Hat’s subscriptions from capacity to consumption models. This allowed for Red Hat products on public cloud providers and led to the creation of the Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider Program, which includes 1,000+ Red Hat partners and lets customers use multi- and hybrid-cloud paradigms across the entire Red Hat portfolio.

Ferris has also worked to define the company’s business architecture, leading strategy and business negotiations on high-profile partnerships as well. These efforts have enabled Red Hat to combine the open source development model with its value propositions and various subscription models to meet changing market needs.

Ferris is either the sole or a teamed inventor of more than 85 issued U.S. patents in the space of cloud computing, all of which are covered under Red Hat's patent promise in support and defense of open source development.

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Andrew Brown

Senior Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer

Andrew Brown is Senior Vice President and Chief Revenue Officer for Red Hat. His focus is on empowering businesses to build flexible, cross-platform IT infrastructure solutions using open source solutions. He is responsible for commercial and public sector sales, channel and alliances sales, and consulting and training services. He leads the company’s global go-to-market strategy, as well as revenue growth for Red Hat's products, services, and solutions in more than 40 countries.

A software industry veteran, Brown arrived at Red Hat in 2023 with more than 28 years experience in hybrid cloud and transformational technology. He began his career at IBM as an intern and held various positions working out of the UK, Japan and Canada. Most recently served as General Manager, Technology Group, IBM United Kingdom & Ireland, where he drove the business strategy, sales and marketing, and overall financial performance for Software & Cloud in EMEA. His passion lies in delivering superior customer experiences and success through trusted advisor relationships. On a personal front, he is a Foundation of Hearts board member, supporting Heart of Midlothian football club, the UKs largest professional fan owned club in the UK, and the community it serves.

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Emily Bock

Senior Product Manager - Ansible Automation Platform

Emily Bock is a Senior Product Manager for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, focusing on certified and validated content, partner independent software provider (ISV) onboarding, and automation analytics.

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Matthew Jones

Distinguished Engineer and Chief Ansible Architect

Matthew Jones is a Distinguished Engineer and Chief Architect of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. He was one of the original developers for Ansible, working on Ansible Tower. He has more than 20 years of experience building highly scalable software systems across startups and enterprises.

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Craig Brandt

Senior Principal Product Manager, Ansible

Craig Brandt is a Senior Principal Product Manager for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. Craig previously served as a Solution Architect representing Red Hat at the IBM Services Integration Hub, focusing on large, complex deals across EMEA, LATAM, and Canada. He has more than 18 years of experience in automation, containerization, management, operations, development, and solution design.

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Colin McNaughton

Principal Technical Marketing Manager, Ansible

Colin McNaughton is a Technical Marketing Manager for the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform business unit, where he focuses on infrastructure automation, the automation creator experience, and Event-Driven Ansible.

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Rachel Hanessian

Principal Product Manager Gen AI

Rachel Hanessian is the Lead Product Manager for Adobe Experience Platform AI Assistant. During her tenure at Adobe, Rachel has contributed to the Adobe Experience Data Model and led the ideation of tooling for scalable experimentation.

In her current role, Rachel is focused on revolutionizing productivity and democratizing data access by introducing a natural language interface AI Assistant, to bolster the platform's effectiveness and usability. Prior to Adobe, she implemented healthcare software at Epic Systems and improved clinical workflows, and at Teach for America, she boosted mathematics students' outcomes in Phoenix.

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Mike Barrett

Vice President and General Manager, Red Hat Hybrid Platforms

Mike Barrett is the Vice President and General Manager of Red Hat Hybrid Platforms. He looks after Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat Cloud Services, Red Hat OpenStack, Red Hat Virtualization, and most of Red Hat’s Cloud Native Computing Foundation investments.

He joined Red Hat in 2013 and specializes in accelerating application platforms through the use of operating systems, cloud, and hardware technologies. Mike has more than 25 years of experience in datacenter architecture. He previously worked in both services and product management roles at Sun Microsystems and Oracle before joining Red Hat.

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Pat Gelsinger

Chief Executive Officer

Patrick (Pat) Gelsinger is Chief Executive Officer of Intel Corporation and serves on its board of directors. Gelsinger has more than 4 decades of technology leadership and experience driving innovation, such as the creation of USB and Wi-Fi, including 30 years at Intel in engineering and executive roles.

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Shiv Vaithyanathan

Vice President, Platform Engineering and Architecture

Shivakumar (Shiv) Vaithyanathan is the Vice President of Platform Engineering and Architecture, responsible for all aspects of the Adobe Experience Platform (AEP), including GenAI efforts. Prior to Adobe, Shiv was an IBM Fellow with more than 20 years in IBM Research. His research has been at the cusp of natural language processing, databases, and machine learning.

This work has resulted in systems for natural language processing (SystemT) that are widely used in enterprise and distributed machine learning (SystemML), including an Apache open source project. He has published more than 40 papers at major conferences and holds more than 20 patents across these areas. Shiv is the recipient of the inaugural “Test-of-time” award from the Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL) for his seminal paper in sentiment analysis in 2002.

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Sally O’Malley

Principal Software Engineer

Sally Ann O'Malley is a Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat. She has worked on various teams within the hybrid platforms business, focusing on Red Hat OpenShift. Currently, she is with the Emerging Technologies group at Red Hat. She enjoys combining open source tools in creative ways to solve complex problems. Occasionally, she creates something new!

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Nuno Martins

Principal Technical Marketing Manager, Red Hat Ansible

Nuno Martins is a Technical Marketing Manager for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. He is a Red Hat Certified Architect and a Certified Instructor with over 15 years of experience in multiple technologies. Currently based in South Africa, he has international experience and has worked all over Europe and Africa.

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Varun Gupta

Vice President, Software Engineering

Varun Gupta, Vice President of Software Engineering at Salesforce, is a seasoned technology executive with 18 years of experience in designing, building, and managing complex distributed systems for modern applications.

He is known for leading large engineering teams through transformational projects, focusing on scalability, reliability, and performance. Varun has developed robust distributed architectures, cloud-native solutions, and scalable microservices, earning him multiple patents for his work on large-scale automated systems.

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Red Hat Summit is the premier enterprise open source event for IT professionals to learn, collaborate, and innovate on technologies from the datacenter and public cloud to the edge and beyond.